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XKCD
xkcd is a web cartoon created by Randall Munroe, a NASA robot designer, from Chesterfield, Virginia (he currently lives in Somerville, Massachusetts). Self-described "a web comic of romance, sarcasm, mathematics and language" (a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language). The themes of the strips vary. Some are statements about life and love, and others are internal jokes of science or mathematics. Some are of a simple humor or with references to pop culture. Although the style of the drawings is very simple and the characters that appear are drawn as palo men, characteristic landscapes are sometimes shown, intricate mathematical patterns such as fractals, or imitations of the style of other cartoonists (as in the week of the parody). The strip is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License. The new strips appear on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at midnight. Sometimes it is updated more frequently for special occasions. History The comic started in September 2005 when Munroe decided to scan the scribbles he had made in his school notebooks and put them on his website. Finally the comic moved to its own website, where Munroe started selling comic-based shirts. Currently, Munroe is working full-time on comics, making xkcd a self-sufficient comic book. xkcd is not an acronym, and Munroe does not give any meaning to the name, except as a joke within the comic. He claims that in principle xkcd was an alias he selected as a combination of letters that meant nothing, not confusing and phonetically unpronounceable. On September 23, 2007, hundreds of people were found at the coordinates mentioned in one of the strips. 42.39561 -71.13051. Fans gathered in a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the author of the strips appeared. Life imitating xkcd Randall Munroe. On several occasions, the fans have been motivated by Munroe's comics to carry out, in real life, some themes from some of the strips. Some notable examples are: * Richard Stallman is "attacked" by students dressed in ninjas who then give him a katana before a talk at the YalePolitical Union. Inspired by Open Source * When Cory Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioner Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, glasses and a balloon. Inspired by Blagofaire. * There have been cases of xkcd readers sneaking chess boards on a roller coaster. Inspired by Chess Photo * A reader of xkcd created a program that leaves a love note in the master boot record. Inspired by fight * Munroe once asked the readers of the cartoon to contribute photos of themselves playing the electric guitar while they bathed, this on the website wetriffs.com, inspired by the comic rule 34 * During the 24th Congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin in December 2007, a contest called "Rule 34 contest: There is porn of it" was held in the absence of minors, cameras and media, inspired by the previous strip, where the contestants had to find pornography on the Internet based on rare topics chosen by the organization. * Based on the alternative text of the comic 903 People modify the Wikipedia categories so that the rule that says "If in any Wikipedia article (in English) you click repeatedly on the first link (which is not in parentheses, or in italics), at some point you will come to the word "philosophy". Ex: Grizzly Bear -> Subspecies -> Biological classification -> Biologist -> Scientist -> System -> Cybernetics -> Interdisciplinarity -> List of academic disciplines -> Academy -> Community -> Group -> Group (mathematics) -> Mathematics -> Quantity -> Property (philosophy) -> Modern philosophy -> Philosophy